How to identify which CMS is used on a website?

It might happen to you that your client will ask you which CMS their competitors (or someone whose website they like) use. Of course there are some basic steps to find this out:

1] Check the footer or sidebar for a "Powered By" logo.
2] See the favicon image in your browsers address bar (anyway some CMSs like Kentico allow changing it easily).
3] Search for “Login-link” or try a default login link to the CMS (e.g. for Ektron: www.example.com/login.aspx or www.example.com/cmslogin.aspx or for Drupal: www.example.com/?q=user)
4] Look for the “Designed by” link and check out the designer website – they might often openly speak about the CMS they use

Anyway, some of these steps don’t always work or might be time consuming. This is where on-line CMS detectors come in handy. I have tested four of these analyzers on websites of 11 major CMS vendors with the following results:

1] W3Techs provides the most comprehensive information set on the technologies used, it was also the most effective tool in our test for identifying the CMS used. The tool can be reached via web page or used as a bookmarklet, a browser extension or a google subscribed link.

2] BuiltWith represents a really powerful tool that even in its free version shows a technology profile for given a website which includes information on:

It also provides a SEO profile with basic SEO items as Metadata, Page Keywords or Response Time. The overall SEO score is given as well (very similar system as WebsiteGrader).

3] Wappalyzer is a user-friendly browser add-on that uncovers the technologies used on websites. It detects CMS and e-commerce systems, message boards, JavaScript frameworks, hosting panels, analytics tools and more. It shows the results straight in the address bar or in the status bar.

4] CMS Detector works perfectly for revealing the webserver, framework or language used by a website. Unfortunately it lacks this power of identifying the CMS.

5] CMSeye is a simple tool focused only on identifying the CMS, it mostly works only for open source CMSs and sometimes it’s not accurate (even we don’t believe that the Ektron website does run on Wordpress).

As a bonus, here comes the tool that identify which web publishing systems that are the most popular in different parts of Europe (unfortunately execluding the main markets for Kentico CMS - USA, AUS, CAN): CMSCrawler.com

Petr is the Senior Business Analyst, responsible for the mapping and optimization of the sales funnel and revenue cycle leveraging the Kentico Customer Experience Management solution for online marketing activities.